Re: Mega-Powerful Nitrate and Phosphate Remover Replaces Skimmer, Refugium, Everythin
keifer:
Ok your pics are up. I'll answer all your posts together here, slightly edited:
its a 75g with 29gal tank for sump. i picked up the big daddy cfl 65 watt/300 watt comparable 3,900 lumens. and i only have about 35lbs of live rock maybe. thats pushin it. 2" sandbed, run an undersized skimmer, i think euro reef usa made for 55g. screen is 12x12 inland aquatics [pre-grown]
Ok first thing I see from your pics and description is that yours is about a 100g system (heavily loaded like you said), with little help from the skimmer, and very little help from LR. Rule of thumb: 1 square inch screen, lit both sides, for each gallon. Since your screen is one sided, you'd need 200 inches. You bought 12 X 12 from IA, which is only 144 sq in. So it's undersized. Not all is lost yet, however
my nitrates are up its only been 2 weeks and it looks like there at a stand still but im feeding heavily
You might have had some die-off of the screen after you received it. But if N is stable now, it should not be a problem.
also where the light is the brightest theres a certain type of algae that looks like an oil spill its go a rainbow of colors yellowish greenish brown
Yes that shows how important a powerful light is, that is close to the screen. The oil spill look is when it's pulling out massive amounts of nutrients. My LFS test did that the first time too.
also no yellowing in my water; ive noticed its like a bag of carbon... u just dont put it in; u rinse first. just clean ur scrubber, rinse until theres no more yellow dripping of it
Good to hear.
i run a skimmer just cause my numbers r up there but when there down to nuthing then ill remove
Probably will take a month or so to get the numbers down in your situation.
so i cleaned yesterday to the point where everything was off, except for the red turf that didnt come off
Good; that's how you do it: Clean off everying (in your weekly cleaning) that grows on top of the real turf. Then you can scrape the real turf with a razor blade once a month or so.
[yesterday] the screen was bare, and today the screen is covered. been in for 2 weeks; not much growth the first week. but adjusted to my tank and now my first week cleaning was about the same growth that grew (lol) in one day. yesterday from today.
I think that's from the bigger CFL light. It's now pulling out serious stuff. That's the power of a pre-grown screen... starts up at full power.
i test with api nitrate test and i lost color chart but yellow good red bad im orange and since ive been testing it looks like its getting a lighter color. [N] was usually just goin up everyday, but with the new light i think that will speed up the growing process
Ok good that it's coming down now. That big 65W CFL will make a huge difference.
yea the 65 watt one is the biggest they sell at home depot but i have seen them online bigger 200watt comparable/to a 800watt. but i have no room there. mine is still a spiral shape and its almost the length of 12x12 screen
That light is the single best thing you could have done. Ok, now for some things to look at to get better performance:
o Get Salifert N and P kits, so we can measure using the same tests.
o Put some kind of a reflector behind the light, or get one of those clip-on-light circular reflectors. As it is now, you are losing half your light into that back wall.
o Put another light on the other side. This will fix the problem of the screen being too small: 144 inches is fine if lit on both sides. It will just take a few weeks to catch up with the pre-grown side (and this is exactly what I did, and now both sides are covered in turf.)
o Measure the flow: see how many seconds it takes to fill up a one gallon jug. At 12" wide, you should have up to 420 gph flowing.
o Dose iron, like Kent's Iron, per the instructions on the bottle.
o Since your setup is new, you might clean it once a day for a while until the oil-spill stuff becomes less. You don't want it smothering your real turf, which needs light and flow to live. Later, the oil stuff will go away as the nutrients come down.
o What is feeding the pipe?... a pump or overflow?
